"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever."— Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen

!pr0n
Thursday, January 03, 2008

Ever play that game: notpr0n? It's game where the idea is to figure out each little puzzle to get the URL to the next level. And while I don't know if it's "the hardest riddle on the Internet," it's certainly very cleverly designed, and has a distinct lack of adult material of any kind.

Well I saw these images and thought the moniker was perfectly applicable. There is absolutely nothing dirty depicted at all; but I closed the web page pretty fast after I viewed it at work. So the question is: is this pornography?

Sure. After all, silhouettes are still art, and the canvas is just as much a part of the painting as the paint is. But the philosophical implications of these images are what really got my gears turning. The definition of what is obscene (or what is art, or what is beautiful) cannot be derived at all from the actual content of a given piece of art. These terms only become meaningful in the context of the individual's perception of a piece. But if this is so: how can we hope to define standards at all? Perhaps Justice Potter Stewart was right on the money. We can't define obscenity, but we know it when we see it.

The Red Bull Diary is the personal pulpit and intellectual dumping-ground for its author, an amateur game designer, professional programmer, political centrist and incurable skeptic. The Red Bull Diary is gaming, game design, politics, development, geek culture, and other such nonsense.